


Dead Letter

by stateofintegrity



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:55:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27006928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stateofintegrity/pseuds/stateofintegrity
Summary: MASH 4077 loses one of its own and the consequences are unbearable for Major Winchester.
Relationships: Maxwell Klinger/Charles Emerson Winchester III
Comments: 11
Kudos: 12





	Dead Letter

Charles wakes knowing that something is wrong. 

Distant wailing has sounded and entered his dreams and now Pierce is at his bedside with the dark eyes of a broken-backed bird; hopeless knowledge flooding the pupils, a dark carpet unfurling in anticipation of true dark, turned earth dark,  _ death  _ dark. 

“Pierce? What is it? What’s wrong?” 

“Get dressed, Charles. Potter wants us.”

“Choppers? Ambulances?” he asks as he dresses without looking at the garments he has chosen. 

Pierce just shakes his head. “Worse. This time, we lost one of ours. One of us.” 

But though Charles demands - and fears - a name, Benjamin Franklin Pierce does not answer as they make their way to Potter’s tent. Mulcahy is there, purple stole twined in his fingers; Charles is alarmed to see that tears stand in his eyes. His lips move soundlessly- praying - and Winchester is struck with the absurd wish to stop him. What use is prayer now? Margaret enters a few moments later, then BJ, and he feels relief each time. 

Potter is the last to show and his snowy hair is somehow darker than his face; for a moment, Charles thinks, though it’s mad to do so, that Potter is mortally wounded, and has assembled them for some kind of last monologue, like a character taking fifteen minutes to die onstage. 

Potter opens his mouth and finds the path to his voice choked off by emotional debris; he clears his throat and tries again. “I just got off the horn with Kimpo. They’re bringing us… the body… tomorrow. Padre, we’ll do services tomorrow evening if it stays quiet.” Margaret pats his shoulder but he doesn’t seem to register the touch. “I imagine some of you may want to speak at the funeral and I think that’d be a swell idea. I’ll be manning the phones this morning in search of a Stateside translator to get word to the boy’s family, so Hunnicutt, you’re in charge.”

Hunnicutt starts to speak and Potter waves off any protest. “I know Pierce is chief surgeon and Winchester outranks you. I’m grieving, not senile. The thing is, I need these two on deck for another matter. Margaret, you help Hunnicut.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Padre, you make sure everyone knows you’re open for business. Everyone is going to take this hard.”

“Of course.” 

“Dismissed.” 

Margaret, BJ, and Mulcahy go, but not without a backward glance that feels lifted straight out of the legend of Orpheus; then, the door shuts and Charles is truly is in hell. He doesn’t know if it’s his CO or his tentmate that helps him sit down, he just knows that the phrase  _ I can’t stand this _ now has a darker origin than he ever imagined. Everything is foggy, distant, and strange. 

“What do you need from us, Colonel?” 

Potter gives a ragged sigh. “It’s a damn fool thing to think, Pierce, but I thought I was done losing friends. Thought that maybe the fact that they didn’t call it a ‘war’ would protect us somehow. I sent that boy to his death, you know.” 

“He was doing his job. You didn’t draft him.”

“I didn’t send him home either.” His tough, seamed hands tremble. “I knew how scared he was…” He shakes his head. “That’s my bear to wrestle. You two are headed up to Seoul. The judge advocates’ office needs your signature on some things, Winchester. Pierce, you take him. It’s not the sort of trip a man should take on his lonesome.” 

“Colonel, I don’t understand. Are you saying… am I to take it that…?” He can’t say it. 

“Pierce, you didn’t tell him?”

“How could I?” 

“Damn it, Pierce! I can’t trust you for any task that doesn’t have you holding a scalpel!” Then he gentles, turns to the surgeon who so recently joined them and who, he fears, is about to be broken by the name he speaks. “Major, I got a call from I Corps this morning. There was a skirmish in the mountains. Corporal Klinger was on his way back here with supplies. He didn’t make it. I’m sorry, son.” 

Pierce is, against all odds and universal maxims, too, holding his hand. The bone structure is good, the fingers long, and despite the man’s lanky height, his hand is still small in Winchester’s. “Cause of death?” 

Pierce squeezes his fingers. “No. Charles, you don’t need to picture it.” 

“Now, hold on, Pierce,” says the CO. “ _ Not knowing  _ can lead a man to to torture himself with images he makes up out of whole cloth.”

Every single one of them wince at the final word; they have all seen Klinger’s fingers fly as he sewed; they all know the shy but pleased way he had of stepping out in something new, waiting for their comments. 

Potter looks to Winchester, then. “Do you need to know it, Major?”

“I think I do. Please.” 

Potter is amazed he hasn’t asked about the papers; it is a testament to the depth of the pain he is trying so hard not to let in. “Exsanguination. It wasn’t fast or easy, I’m afraid.” 

The hand not in Pierce’s grips the chair arm so hard the wood whines. “The location of the wound?” 

“For godsakes, Colonel!” Pierce cries, but, knowing what he does, how can Potter deny him the terrible knowledge? 

“There was nothing anyone could have done, and you won’t believe me, Winchester, but that includes you. The bullet was a ricochet. There was just too much damage.” 

_ Chest  _ damage, he knows.  _ Heart  _ damage. His specialties. 

“You two need to get on the road. Judge advocates’ big on efficiency, not on human feelings.”

Winchester surfaces. “I’m sorry - where are we going? And why?” What can there possibly be to do  _ now _ ? 

“This is going to go hard with you, Major. I’d spare you if I could, but my two little eagles are no match for the whole bureaucracy and it’s your name on the thing, down to the Roman numeral.” 

“My name… my name on what?” 

Pierce takes over, rescuing his exhausted CO. Potter’s loss, he knows, is greater than theirs; the ghosts of three wars are with him today and one is so bright-eyed and so fresh and so near… “You’re Klinger’s beneficiary, Charles.”

“ _ What _ !?” 

“Not for the main stuff. His army benefits will go to his mom and uncle. His life insurance, though, his personal effects- those are yours.” 

“Why?” 

Potter shares a look with Pierce and they reach a silent accord. There is such a thing as too much to bear. 

Potter pats his arm. “It doesn’t matter for now. The thing is, the army’s fussy about handing benefits over to anyone who doesn’t share the last name of the deceased. They’ll want you to sit there and swear you didn’t twist his arm, especially given your rank.” 

This is insult layered on injury atop injustice. “Twist his arm!? Colonel, I barely speak… spoke… to the Corporal!” 

“I know it, Winchester, but it’s the army’s party and they’ll have their regulations. Go and get it over with.” 

They go because they do not know how to do otherwise. 

Pierce drives because asking Charles to operate anything beyond his own shaking limbs right now would be inhumane. 

“You really didn’t know?” 

Charles turns eyes on him that are unnaturally pain-bright; eyes that have looked into lightning and come away silver-seared at having seen too much. Hawk knows - maybe alone of everyone on Earth unless Klinger wrote someone back home - how beautiful Klinger found those eyes. He caught him once mooning over paint samples in varying shades of lilac, silver, grey, and blue. “They’d only add up to the right color if you layered them,” he’d admitted when Hawkeye had teased him. “Like colors in a jewel. Or in the sea.” 

“No.” He buries his fingers in the hem of Pierce’s dress uniform. “Pierce, I know you don’t mean the paperwork alone. Please, tell me. Help me understand this.” 

“After,” Pierce promises. “Potter’s right. First the paperwork.”  _ Then _ , he thinks,  _ I’ll buy you the biggest cognac in Korea.  _

***

Charles drifts in and out if a haze as the lawyer fires questions that dig under his skin like a scalpel in the hands of a first year med student; muscles are hacked into, veins severed, arteries nicked. Pierce tries to close the worst of the wounds as they’re made, but there’s so much Charles doesn’t understand even as it’s asked, then repeated. He even hesitates to sign because it means entering his “relationship to the deceased” and he has no idea what that is… and everyone - even this blathering paper pusher - seems to, and seems to think it freighted with something no one will name. The counselor seems to believe he is cheating the government, even when Charles explains that he is rich enough never to work again, but he eventually shuffles the papers together and pronounces it done. Neither Charles nor Pierce shake his outstretched hand or listen to the platitudes that begin, “Your friend died in support of a noble cause…” 

Then Pierce is leading him away and he thinks that somehow Klinger is dead  _ because _ he signed, because he agreed to acknowledge and, perversely, benefit from the loss. He tries to tell Pierce this while they drink and drink and drink (doing so in the hotel room because, by unspoken agreement, they plan to swim down so deep they go blackly blind), but the Captain shakes his head. “Klinger wanted this for you in the event of his death.” He bites his tongue to avoid saying what Klinger had desired in the event of his continuing  _ life _ . “But nothing you did or didn’t do sent him to it.” 

He grips the table’s edge, knuckles going white. “Why did he send me  _ here _ ?” 

He knows it is the right question because something shatters behind Pierce’s face; his pain-bright eyes grow brighter still and Charles thinks of death masks.  _ Hopeless _ , those eyes say, and they are looking right at him. 

Pierce finds clean glasses and pours fresh drinks. If he was more himself, Charles would stop these stalling tactics, but a young man is dead and he finds all responses to loss valid; grief cannot be prescribed or circumscribed by anything outside the heart; it is a wild country to be traveled alone. 

“Charles, I’m going to tell you something and it’s going to hurt, so I’m going to do it as fast as I can. Okay?” 

He nods; he, too, is a healer. He knows why some pain must be dealt quick as snakebite… knows its aftereffects tend to linger. 

“Corporal Maxwell Q. Klinger was in love with you.” 

“Pierce? No.” He wants to accuse him of joking, but no one, not even Pierce, would joke over top of Klinger’s newly stilled body. “You… you are mistaken. You  _ must _ be.” 

“I’m sorry,” Pierce says. He presses his forehead to the other man’s so that their tears mingle, flowing down one face so that each of them can pretend they belong to the other man. “I am, Charles. But I’m not wrong or mistaken or mixed up.” 

He allows Charles to sob, to catch his breath and Pierce  _ knows  _ that he’s crying for several things: a useless war, a young man who should never have left Toledo, fabric creations that will never be finished, a love extinguished before he knew existed. (Pierce will not say - as Potter would not - but that love had never seemed hopeless to them or entirely one-sided. There had been a fit to the two).   


When Charles discovers his voice, he tasks Pierce as his guide. It’s the worst thing Hawkeye has ever undertaken - worse than surgery on the bodies of children ruined by bombs - but who else  _ could  _ do it? And, in the end, isn’t he doing it  _ for  _ Klinger? It’s the truest monument the young man will ever have.

“How… how can you be sure?” 

“He told me, Charles.”

“Why?!” It’s a cry. _Why were you allowed to know when I was not?  
_

“I was joking with him about it. I saw the way he looked at you. He told me it wasn’t a joke.” 

Charles doesn’t know what to say. It certainly sounds like Max, to have been honest even when his honesty would have caused him pain.  If that young man with his perpetual smile had asked him for comfort… he wants to believe he would have given it, but knows in the deepest ravines of his spirit, that it is far more likely that he would have teased Klinger to hide his own fear... or been cruel to him.  _ I am not worth what you felt, Max. I never was _ . 

“I kissed him once,” Pierce tells him, a strange smile contorting his mouth, his skin damp with tears. “A charity thing. What do they call those? Kissing booths. If I could, I’d pass that kiss to you, Charles.”

It is the second noblest wish anyone has ever had for the stuffy Boston surgeon. He slumps across Pierce’s body and sobs. 

***

Charles does not attend the funeral of the man he can no longer classify. All he knows is what Klinger was  _ not.  _ Once, Klinger had told him how alike they were and he had scoffed. Maybe the young Corporal had been trying to get him to see what they could be… The thought makes Winchester keen like a wounded animal and the sound scares him as much as anything ever has because if he can sound like that - maybe Klinger was right. 

_ I will always be alone _ . 

He can face this thought easier than the sight of an American flag on a coffin (closed because the injuries were that horrible) enclosing his soulmate. 

_ I will be alone because your gentle hands are still and because your last moments were full of pain and fear and because I never held you and I do not understand why that much, at least, was not given to us. I deserve this, perhaps, but you did not.  _

He goes to Klinger’s tent, knowing he will break the lock to get inside if he must. He closes the door and does not pull the cord for the light. Everything hurts enough without added illumination: from the hand-lettered apron hung on a hook to the zaffre dress Winchester has never seen Klinger wear. Maybe he was still embellishing it? Copper sequins outline one side. 

He traces them, wishes a warm, living form was behind them.

He stumbles as he reaches the rack with the outfits Klinger has created. His long arms allow him to envelop the whole line of finery in a hug, and he collapses into cotton and silk and taffeta - all materials meant for arms that cannot - can  _ never _ \- hold him back. He cries himself to sleep with colors and textures puddled around him and Klinger’s smell in his nose. 

***

His face is lined from being pressed to taffeta and wet because apparently he is quite capable of crying in his sleep. Corporal Maxwell Q. Klinger takes in these details even in the bluish early morning dark and forgets his own fatigue. The basin still has water in it so he dampens a shirt and begins to wipe off the Major’s salt-crusted cheeks. Charles opens his eyes only to have the long lashes scrubbed at and a moment passes before he can see who is tending him. 

“ _ Max?”  _ It is a gasp on the edge of becoming a scream and his arms move uselessly on the air, trying to connect to what can only be an apparition, a personal haunt come to punish him for his failure to see. 

“I thought I was the only one who used my closet for a crying towel, Major. What’s got you so down?” 

Charles cannot speak. The words are truly too terrible. “Darling, you  _ died _ . We… they… we  _ buried you _ yesterday!” 

Klinger might not believe this, might have even laughed, (he is obviously quite alive) but the Major’s words have renewed his tears and he is crying again - over  _ him _ . He sees Charles’ thoughts in his eyes: the surgeon wonders if he is mad or dreaming or dead himself, if Max is a ghost. To shatter these wild imaginings, Klinger leans into the taller man, forcing Charles into an embrace that contains his warmth and the mustiness of clothes he can’t wait to change, the dust in his hair and the living strength in his arms. 

“You are really here?” Charles murmurs, petting his hair hesitantly, unsure of what is permitted under these most impossible of circumstances.  _ Mine _ he thinks in a way he is sure Honoria, Pierce, and maybe God Himself would hold selfish.  _ Mine. Mine.  _

“Yeah, Major, I really am. Sorry I got you so rattled.” 

“Rattled?” He swipes at his cheeks. “I have been in  _ purgatory _ ! What happened to you!?” Then he changes his mind. It is a mammoth trespass, but if he can inherit this man’s life insurance, he can do this. It doesn’t take much effort to pull Klinger down into the pile of clothing and kissing him is far, far easier than signing those hated forms; his mouth is warm and alive and responsive and Charles doesn’t let up until he makes him moan. 

“Y’know, I get sent on trips all over the place, Major, and this is the first time I’ve gotten such a swell welcome back. Wanna tell me what caused this little change of heart?”

“After?” Charles bargains. “Please, Max?” 

Klinger kicks out of his shoes. His name has never come out of someone’s mouth sounding like “beloved” before.” His hands card through the softness of his creations. He’s never imagined getting got in the middle of them, but he’s not complaining. He’s never seen Charles like this; the surgeon is somehow both grave and gentle, full of wonder and shaky with desire. And though it should surprise no one, his hands are talented as he pushes the jacket off of Klinger’s shoulder and lets it fall onto the floor. Klinger swallows hard as those hands find their way under his t-shirt and he wishes he was wearing something prettier. 

“M-major?”  _ How is  _ **_this happening_ ** _?  _

“Shh. Shh. It is enough that you are not lost. The rest - you may leave to me.” 

Not only is Maxwell not lost, he is, in this mad pile of finery of which he is both designer and creator, continually  _ found _ … and he is discovering needs and wishes in himself of which he was previously quite oblivious.

_ How do you know how to  _ **_do that_ ** ? he wants to demand when Charles touches him so well that his eyes tear up.  _ Do they teach this stuff in med school? No wonder Captain Pierce always has a date.  _

He’s scared - a lot, actually - when things begin to accelerate, but Charles reads this and holds him close to ask why his eyes have changed. “I’ve never… I want to, but…” 

Charles is visibly surprised, but he is (keyed up as Max knows he is) also incredibly kind. Finding a blanket, he wraps the two of them together and smooths dark bangs away from troubled eyes. “Forgive me, my darling. I never thought… I was being quite selfish. Acting out of fear. We need do nothing, now or ever, that frightens you. I ought not to have presumed on your heart.” 

His presumption is more than alright by Max. “How did you… how did you know?” 

Charles gapes at him before he realizes that Max clearly doesn’t  _ know  _ he’d been declared KIA… so his mind probably hasn’t been on his will. Explaining, he soon has the Corporal wrapped around him to give comfort, a situation that feels backwards but very nice. “Major… baby… Charles, I’m  _ so sorry _ . It was pretty bad for you, huh?” 

“Finding out I had been blind to the great love of my life? Yes, it was terrible.”

“You get why I didn’t say, though, right?” 

Charles does. He is an officer. He and Max exist worlds apart. However, no one has ever ruined his heart the way Maxwell did in death… and no one has ever fit like this in his arms. “I regret that I did not see on my own. That I did not walk you back to your tent and kiss your hand. If you will allow it… if you still desire me… I will court you properly, I swear it.” 

Klinger laughs gently. “We’re in a war, Major. I’m a guy who wears dresses. Your family would hate me on sight… in the dark, probably. You don’t have to worry about being too proper.” 

“I do not care about my family, Max, or the army, outside its ability to cause trouble that we do not need. And I promise to treasure you, dear one, in dresses or out. I merely wish to deserve you. Please say that I may try.”

Max doesn’t think he will need to try all that hard, if he is going to look at him like that, if he is so ready to accept all he is. “I’m yours if you want me, Charles.” Hadn't he more or less signed himself over with those forms? He spares a moment of pity for the clerk who's going to have untangle this mess and hopes the man has something for the headaches and stomach acid that will result. 

At this moment, a commotion outside the tent commands their attention. They hear Potter saying something about sending Winchester home, but not knowing how he will explain that the man was wounded with a bullet fired miles away. 

After that, the scene quite dissolves into chaos as Klinger is discovered alive and the 4077th transforms into a celebration of the fact. Charles gets scolded half to death for not  _ immediately  _ reporting this news, though something in the Colonel’s eyes says that the older man is proud of him, happy for him. Given the other goings on that make the 4077th such an interesting and exasperating unit, Charles knows the CO will protect him and his new-won love until he can figure out the legal ins and outs of protecting Max himself, forever. He smiles, still shaky, when he thinks of the new tier of fabrics and materials he can introduce the dear thing to. Potter and Father Mulcahy undertake the dour work of discovering who they have buried and wrongly eulogized and Charles shakes their hands because they are good men, far better men than he. 

Watching Charles walk to Klinger’s side, seeing the pretty Corporal brighten just for him, the padre and the former cavalry officer share a look. “He’ll be different now,” Potter tells his priest. “He’s been fighting Death all his privileged life, but he never fought it for someone that belonged to him.” 

Mulcahy shook his head. “It’s not all the death around here that changes us, sir, meaning no disrespect.” 

“You don’t think so, padre?”

“No. It’s the love.”

And though they say quite different blessings in the quiet of their minds, they do bless the two and wish them every happiness with any loss they might face reserved to be faced down many, many, many decades away. 

End! 

  
  
  



End file.
